BYU fooled us for one week. UCF just exposed the Cougars’ CFP reality

You can stop taking No. 3 Brigham Young seriously.

One of the big stories coming out last weekend after scoring a memorable win against No. 8 Notre Dame, the Cougars thudded back to reality with a 39-31 loss in double overtime at Central Florida, a middling Big 12 team and program that hadn’t come within a mile of national relevance since bringing back Scott Frost.

Losing to a Frost-coached team is a special type of accomplishment. Once seen as a rising star, the former Nebraska coach is 25-41 overall and 14-35 in conference play in the Power Four. Teams that lose to UCF are hard to view as legitimate, even if BYU is only seven days removed from a major win against one of the sport’s biggest brands.

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So this is probably who the Cougars are: a good team that will compete for the Big 12 crown and may even have the final record for an at-large playoff berth, but one that won’t be anything more than a bug splatting on the windshield of the best teams in the SEC and Big Ten.

Again, they lost to UCF.

Other top teams have suffered weird losses, too, but this paints BYU as a one-week pretender for the national championship instead of a season-long contender.

Ohio State lost to Texas. So did Tennessee. Indiana lost to the Buckeyes. Ole Miss lost to Florida. Georgia lost to Auburn, sure, but the Tigers are a juggernaut compared to the Knights.

BYU is a late arriver on this year’s scene. Before last week, the Cougars were at best an enigma after a perfect start against an easy schedule.

But they’re not playing in the SEC or the Big Ten. Those two leagues are engaging in a form of cannibalization that’s unmatched in Power Four history. BYU is living in the Big 12, which is closer to the American than those two heavyweights. Every loss in Big 12 play should count double when comparing BYU to teams from legitimate conferences.

By early December, the Cougars might be 11-2 and the Big 12 runner-up, or maybe 12-1 and the conference champions. The latter will be in the mix for a first-round bye; the former will probably still be in the playoff, thanks in large part to the win against the Irish.

But BYU is back at square one. While beating Notre Dame was nice, the loss to UCF will make the Cougars easy to ignore the rest of the way.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: BYU fooled us for one week. UCF just exposed the Cougars’ CFP reality

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